Narration Round 3

Play the current version : ShootOut

Hey everyone ! This week won't bring new build for you, sorry for that ! But the wait will worth it!

The first chapter is almost done, roughly, there will have a lot of polishing to be done. You will soon discover how the story will be handled!

The plot is quite basic. Amanda and Romeo are hired to break into 7SidesCorp building. Sophie is an employee of 7Sides, she will have to protect a precious and mysterious alien artifact. Jack, as a police officer work inderectly for the Corp, he hears about a coup in 7Sides and investigate.

This is the chart I use, a simple Inkscape document (I love Inkscape)!  I manage the toryState with 4 main variables :

• A character Name
• A chapter integer
• An alignment integer
• a step integer

Names, chapters and steps are quite obvious, with them I can know who's playing and where he/she stands in the story. In the chart above you can see that, for this first chapter, there are some branching and two possible conclusion. Some boxes are outlined with green, this will be used if you already played the chapter with another character. If so, the game will use the outcome you had.

For example if you succeeded to investigate with Jack, the alarm will be active when you try to break into 7Sides with Romeo... and so on.

Later I'll add one another possible outcome : each character will have the opportunity at key time to switch side, hence the alignment variable. But this is for an another chapter.

A first version should be ready for you to test next week! 'til then don't hesitate to play the current build and leave feedback!

Play the current version : ShootOut

Game Master!

Play the current version : ShootOut

When I decided to devote some time and love to the Narration System I was quite naive due to inexperience (I levelled up!). I did not realise that the Story System, to achieve what I envision for it, is encapsulating quite a bunch of Sub Systems.

• A Cut Scenes System (what I originally limited the task to)
• A Mission System (To set goals, Objectives & validate or not the outcome)
• A Npc Script System (To make bots perform some precise tasks that would be an over killing effort to implement on a generic AI)
• A Spawn System (To be able to spawn characters and set them up depending of the state of the story)
• And of course the Story System that encapsulate and make use of them all.

That explains why I could not publish a build for you to test since one month now. As I need a week to at least draft each system IF I subdivide well the work, which I obviously did not in this case, resulting to be overwhelmed by diverse and too different tasks.

But everything is coming together. The StoryTeller Actor I told you about in some previous DevLog as fatten up. It is now not only checking StoryStates and triggering a Sequence, but it can also Spawn actors, Start Scripts on them, Start Mission and check it states. It literally does the job of a Game Master in tabletop role playing game in fact. It is working well and will grow even fatter in the future.

Here a demonstration. Playing as Amanda. She's part of a team whom decided to break in 7Sides Corp. They planned to pass through a sewer. Amanda's role is to dispatch silently any guards but she's not skilled in hacking electronic devices. That's Romeo's role.

Still a lot of work making all this more sexy. But the StoryTeller is doing its job, and all its little soldiers be them Mission, Spawner, Cut Scenes components also. They all implement their useful functions and variable and communicate to each other as needed. They are quite easy to set up, reusable at envy and of course eagerly awaiting expansion.

Hopefully next week all this will be ready for you to test! I'm quite impatient to publish a build because some parallel improvements has been done.

Until next week, take care in these strange times!

Play the current version : ShootOut